Abstract
The relationship between biodiversity and biomass has been a long standing debate in ecology. Soil biodiversity and biomass are essential drivers of ecosystem functions. However, unlike plant communities, little is known about how the diversity and biomass of soil microbial communities are interlinked across globally distributed biomes, and how variations in this relationship influence ecosystem function. To fill this knowledge gap, we conducted a field survey across global biomes, with contrasting vegetation and climate types. We show that soil carbon (C) content is associated to the microbial diversity–biomass relationship and ratio in soils across global biomes. This ratio provides an integrative index to identify those locations on Earth wherein diversity is much higher compared with biomass and vice versa. The soil microbial diversity-to-biomass ratio peaks in arid environments with low C content, and is very low in C-rich cold environments. Our study further advances that the reductions in soil C content associated with land use intensification and climate change could cause dramatic shifts in the microbial diversity-biomass ratio, with potential consequences for broad soil processes.
Highlights
In ecology, the relationship between biodiversity and biomass has been a long standing debate which originated in plant communities studies by postulating that resource availability is a key regulator of plant productivity and/or
We first show that the relationship between soil microbial biomass and diversity follows a unimodal pattern across global biomes (Fig. 1, Table S2)
We used structural equation modeling (SEM) to further investigate the environmental factors associated with the relationship between microbial diversity and biomass (Fig. 2)
Summary
The relationship between biodiversity and biomass has been a long standing debate which originated in plant communities studies by postulating that resource availability is a key regulator of plant productivity and/or. For broad processes, such as organic matter mineralization, a greater microbial biomass (i.e., in soils with high C content) will have comparatively major effect on soil respiration than diversity because biomass is usually correlated to respiration [34, 35] Following this theoretical framework, we expect that increases in microbial diversity-to-biomass ratio negatively influence soil organic matter mineralization across global biomes. We expect that increases in microbial diversity-to-biomass ratio negatively influence soil organic matter mineralization across global biomes To fill this gap of knowledge, we conducted a crossbiome field survey of 435 soil samples taken from 87 locations across five continents, thereby encompassing a wide range of ecosystem and climate types.
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